


Faded

by CyborgShepard



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Accidental Bonding, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Angst, F/F, Infidelity, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-11-15
Packaged: 2019-06-27 17:41:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15690234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyborgShepard/pseuds/CyborgShepard
Summary: Mondatta had been top priority. And Amelie had been interrupted.





	Faded

They took that part out of her. And they took, and they took. 

_ Her hair is soft when she flies past. It stings her cheek.  _ __  
__  
They pulled her apart, and stuck her back together, better. She’s more of a machine than a person. More of a weapon than a human.    
  
_ Her body feels nice when she slams her into the wall. Bits of the chronal accelerator crack and claw into her chest, but she’s more focused on all the points they’re connected by. She shouldn’t be.  _ __  
__  
She flicks her scope on. The empty bedsit she’s squatting in smells like cigarettes and damp, but coincidentally the living room window aligns perfectly with a tower of apartments fifty yards north-east. She doesn’t breathe because she doesn’t need to. It isn’t because of the redhead; she already knows about her, and she doesn’t care. Movement to the corner; it’s Lena. Scope down.    
  
__ The look in her eyes as Amelie lets her fall is delicious. And Amelie has been so very hungry.

She lights another cigarette and pinches the bridge of her nose. 

*

“It’s too bad,  _ araña, _ ” drawls Sombra, reclined on the stiff park bench, “you’re worth too much since you’ve gone rogue.” 

Amelie’s teeth grind. “So you won’t help.” They’re shaded by a monstrously-sized oak on the west side of a small playground. Children clamber over one another and squeal. Flickers of annoyance singe the corners of something in her. It doesn’t feel like when she would lose a target. That’s different. That’s failure. No, this is not like anything she can remember feeling.    
  
Sombra sighs and inspects her nails. A comm on her wrist is blinking incessantly. Amelie tries not to look at it. “It’s just getting too risky for me. And Doc knows something’s up.”    


Then she’ll figure something else out. No point being here any longer. Dead grass crunches beneath Amelie’s sneakers but she can hear Sombra sigh again, and curse under her breath, so Amelie stops. “I’ll leave you something, but you owe me, alright?”    
  
“I don’t like owing people.”    
  
A flicker of a smile twists Sombra’s mouth. “Then do  _ yourself  _ a favour; turn yourself over.”    
  
Amelie starts across the park.    
  
“They will take you back. They will fix you,  _ araña. _ ”    
  
There’s five grand wired into her fake account that night. She deletes Sombra’s contact from the burner phone, and then crushes it under her heel. 

*

Every night at nine p.m., she begins.    
  
All that she’d taken from Talon was a satchel of venom mines and her rifle, which she props on a tripod bought from a hock shop. The apartment she’s squatting in is an example of minimalist decor: a lamp, a desk chair in front of the tripod, and a cot in the farthest corner from the door, above which a glowing, purple vial spins. She activates it, then she sits, then she pulls on the hood of her sweatshirt on and lights a cigarette. While it burns she’ll try to wade through the cool twistings in her belly; she won’t think about what she’s doing. Amelie will flick the scope up, and it’s only then that her heart seems to move an increment faster than it does at any other point in the day. 

Most nights Lena comes home late. Sometimes, she doesn’t come home at all, and it’s those nights that Amelie sits and watches the redhead like she’s some kind of strange insect Amelie doesn’t know how to squash. She laughed when Sombra told her her name. Now, months later, it’s not so funny. She sucks on her teeth, clenches her jaw. Jealousy is warm and slithers between the rungs of her ribs. 

When Lena does stumble through the door it sends something through Amelie that makes her fingers twitch and her shoulders tighten. Trigger happy is not something she’d ever been, nor possessive. She’d been programmed to be cold and uncaring. 

_That_ is what had been taken out of her. They said she was a beta now, if anything, because really she was their weapon and weapons do not feel, they do not reproduce, they do not _bond._ Track marks hide underneath the tattoo on her right forearm, but suppressants can only hide so much for so long. 

Mondatta had been top priority, an operation for an assassin as clean and efficient as Widowmaker had been manufactured to be. It had Talon’s insides in knots for months. They’d sent her to reconditioning, they’d sent her to O’Deorain, and O’Deorain  _ forgot.  _ One little needle, slipped beneath her skin, but it had slipped her mind.

Amelie, for whatever strange reason, didn’t remind her. 

But Tracer shouldn’t have been there that night. Widowmaker shouldn’t have gotten into such close combat with her; close enough to smell her soft scent hanging on her neck, close enough to see the freckles on her nose, close enough to taste  _ Emily  _ on her. Tracer shouldn’t have been there.    
  
So many should and shouldn’t haves; Amelie wants to slam her into the wall over and over. When she shuts her eyes to sleep she plays the memory of Tracer’s fearful face again and again. Anger, pain, betrayal-- did she betray her? Amelie owes her nothing. There is no trust between them. There is no reason to not let Tracer fall.    
  
There isn’t.   
  
Lena shrugs out of her warn tan jacket and throws it over the couch, then she falls into an exhausted heap on Emily’s lap. A hundred yards away, Amelie sniffs.    
  
They stay like that for a while talking, but Amelie can’t read their lips, and she doesn’t even know where to begin with supplementing parts of a romantic conversation. She hasn’t had a home to come back to in years, nor a shoulder to lean on. She doesn’t remember much of Gerard; just that he existed, until he didn’t.    
  
Overwatch might want her back again, but she’s sure she can remember a few faces who don’t.    
  
She watches them til they go to bed, and then still she sits and waits. Without her infrasight goggles all she can monitor is a sliver between the curtains of the living room. Hours pass. The cigarettes stamp out anything her mouth might hunger for. One a.m., two a.m., and then-- a light, the lamp by the television. It’s soft and orange. Lena is wearing a white cotton shirt and sweats and the accelerator; she crosses into where Amelie knows is a small kitchenette, and comes back carrying a simple chair. She doesn’t seem to have slept, if the way she drags herself is anything to go by.    
  
Amelie licks her lips. Her tongue feels heavy and her teeth almost ache. She opens her thighs around the tripod.    
  
This is where she loosens her control on herself. This is when she can allow herself to feel whatever is locked away under her ribs writhing and wriggling to be let out. This is all she has to go on, that Lena might-- that if they do this then there’s a chance that--   
  
Lena pulls the the seat close to the window, to the sliver between the heavy, navy-coloured curtains. She sits, and she sighs deeply,  and then she looks up out into the black.    
  
Amelie knows Lena can’t see her, but it still seems like she’s staring directly down the scope at her. Down into the empty void where her soul used to be. Lena grits her teeth, and bares her throat. Amelie can almost see her pulse jump, delicious and hot, she can almost smell her scent. Lena’s sweatpants find themselves falling to the floor, Amelie finds herself hard.    
  
Lena’s eyes are dark and empty as her hand plunges down into her underwear.   


*

On Thursdays, the redhead goes to the early morning markets on the fringes of the city and isn’t back til midday, leaving Lena asleep and Amelie ample time to scan the lock to their apartment.    
  
It doesn’t take lot of effort or time to set the pins, and so with little care to being found, she pops the lock.    
  
Lena’s scent spills out into the hallway. Amelie pulls the door shut so she doesn’t do anything stupid. Her hand almost warping the handle in her grip, she breathes slowly through her nose, and shoves the pick back into the keyhole. This time when she wriggles the lock apart, she memorises every twist and push and pull she needs to make, and if it distracts her then that’s just too convenient. 

Open. Breathe her in. Shut. Unlock. Open. 

What’s she doing here? If Lena catches her she’ll understandably kill her. If Emily comes back early, or she piques the interest of a prying neighbour no doubt they’ll alert some kind of authority; that would be undoubtedly worse. 

It’s been two months since she left Talon. She’s surprised they haven’t found her by now.    
  
When they do they’ll shut her down. Or reboot her. It means the same to Amelie. 

She allows a moment of something sore to come through her cracks; she leans her forehead against the doorframe and shuts her eyes. Even through the wood she can smell Lena, and more than anything she wants to just swing open the door and sweep through the room, take Lena into her arms and take her away, somewhere where it’s only the two of them forever. 

This is all her fault. Amelie should have made sure she died when she fell. That would make this undoubtedly easier. Widowmaker would have let her die. Widowmaker would have made her disappear.

She could finish the job now.    
  
Amelie locks the door and turns violently, tearing herself away from Lena’s scent and it rips something in her primal coding. The elevator is out of order, and two omnic technicians are fiddling with a scanner and a holopad, so Amelie rounds the corner and shoulders into the stairwell. She takes the steps down two at a time and doesn’t look as she brushes past someone and they drop their bags.    
  
“Oh, I-” blurts Emily. “Are you okay?”    
  
Amelie sours. She kicks the fire door open on the ground floor.    
  
Out in the street normal people are living their normal lives, and they complain, and laugh, and their hearts beat steadily. Amelie pulls her hood up and cuts into the traffic. Cars growl to stop and hot air ripples beneath them, and even then, the drivers are angry. They feel. They’re allowed to.

She envies them.

On the opposite side of the road there’s a man leaning against a shop front, pointedly staring down at his comm and with his other hand shoved in his pocket. He stands on the corner of the street she needs to take. Calm but mildly irritated she purses her lips.  Amelie’s sneakers slap the pavement as she glides past him and down a side alley that snakes and coils within the fringes of King’s Row’s lower districts. 

Here the road is still made of cobblestone and between the cracks a red heat pulses. Underneath the cobble is the Underworld, made of metal and steam and oil. Amelie can feel its heat through the soles of her shoes.    
  
She sides into a little store with a flaking brown facade.  _ Moriarty’s Fine Books  _ reads in fading gold paint above the doorway, and inside the air is musty and thick. An omnic floats idly around slotting tomes into gaps in shelves and rearranging based on the colour of spine. He pays her no mind and she likes it that way.    
  
A woman is sitting in the corner so Amelie takes the table furthest from any of the dusty windows and sits hunched. Then, as her hands start to fiddle for anything she can pull apart and put back together, she realises she needs a book. The omnic moseys around slowly, and the woman looks like she hasn’t moved from her seat in months, so Amelie rises and begins to scan the nearest shelf.    
  
She used to love to read, she thinks. And dance.    
  
A hardback copy of  _ Swan Lake  _ glitters amongst the brickwork of the books. It’s probably nearly a century old. Amelie sniffs. Her chest feels empty and heavy at the same time.    
  
_ Odette; Odile,  _ she thinks. Amelie and Widowmaker. 

*

The sun is low and red when Amelie heads back to her apartment.    
  
The square she finds herself in is bustling with commuters scurrying home, and Amelie looks up, and her mouth twitches in a smile. She finds her sight points, and she looks east, and finds the building she’d dangled from as she lined up her rifle and watched Mondatta through the red of her scope.    
  
And then came Tracer with such a fire in her eyes, and then came Widowmaker’s descent.    
  
Amelie takes another avenue to her dilapidated building and encounters no one acting so purposefully inconspicuous like the man earlier. So when she finds the small sliver of paper lying peacefully on the stained floor rather than in the doorjamb where she left it she stiffens. But only slightly. It’s been two months. She’s disappointed they didn’t find her sooner.    
  
Her gun is inside. Not as if she could lug it around London on her back. She’d activated her venom mine before she left, so whoever is inside is no doubt choked out on the floor in a pool of their own frothy saliva, with skin as cold as hers, but that doesn’t matter. If Talon knows where she’s been squatting one dead scout means nothing.    
  
She flicks the pin from her pocket and gently pries the lock open. The door clicks softly and she pauses, breathes in and out, and swings the door open and ducks to the right in one swift motion. Her rifle is in her hands in a heartbeat -- not that that means much to her -- and has it aimed for the shadowy figure reclined in her threadbare cot.    
  
“Lucky for you I turned your little bug off,” growls Reaper, “otherwise you’d be deader than you already look.”   
  
Amelie knows her hair is a mess and that her face is gaunter than usual, but she frowns and purses her lips. Her gun glints in the lamplight.    
  
“What are you doing here?” She hides her fear with a bored drawl but Reaper knows her and she knows Reaper. So Amelie knows the building is surrounded. The skin on the back of her neck begins to prick.    
  
Reaper sighs like a disappointed parent. “What are  _ you _ doing, Widow? You’re out of your mind.” He nods to the rectangular bulge in her pocket. “Birthcontrol? So your little pilot doesn’t get pregnant?”    
  
Humiliation and something else flares up inside her as hot as the steam from the Underworld and as sticky and black as the oil. If she knew Reaper could die she’d unload her clip into his chest in an instant.    
  
“I wonder how the pilot would explain that one to her pretty beta.”    
  
Amelie’s teeth grind. “Do you ever shut up?”    
  
Reaper chuckles and rises, one hand on one of his Hellfire pistols in its holster, the other outstretched to her. “Bond’s don’t mean anything. Trust me on this one.”    
  
“I’m not going back to Talon. Trust  _ me  _ on that.”   
  
Reaper shrugs and stalks across the small room. His boots land heavy and every rattle of his pistols sends a shiver down Amelie’s spine. He rounds the tripod and the desk chair and gazes out the bay window. Whistles lowly.    
  
“You’ve been watching her for over a month now. How far gone are you, Amelie?”    
  
“Nothing Talon can’t fix,” she sneers back. Reaper is turned away from her but without a face Amelie has learnt to read instead his body language. She can place all of his shifts and shrugs, even the differences in the way the black seeping from him ripples. But when he reaches for the piece in his ear and turns it so, Amelie has no idea what he’s doing.    
  
“Have you made contact with her? And breaking into her apartment isn’t contact.”   
  
Amelie sniffs. Runs the pad of her finger over the trigger on her rifle like it’s a luck charm. “No. But she knows I’m always… there. I see it in her eyes. She senses me.”   
  
“So you’re stalking her.”   
  
She clicks her tongue, but she’s embarrassed. Heat burns at her neck and to her ears, but in the dark there’s no way Reaper can see her shame. Or has he already? This stinking apartment and her hormone-ravaged self, a fragile shell of the ruthless and cold killer she was. The trigger feels inviting. She could unload into the soggy carpet and feel better, for a moment. 

But instead angrily she hisses, “It’s like staring at water when all you’ve known is dry emptiness.” Frustrated she wants to lash out. “What am I meant to do? When someone else is drinking that water?” 

He’s silent, but she knows he’s thinking, and knows better than to move in or run as much as she wants to kick the chair in front of her. Finally, he grumbles. “Foolish girl.” 

Amelie’s lips twitch in a snarl. “Was it this messy with Morrison?”   
  
“A bloodbath,” Reaper spits back. He turns back to her and stares at her through the mask. Finally, he pulls something from inside his coat, lugs it to her. It’s her wrist-grapple, and she stares at it in such a stunned confusion she almost laughs. “There are men in the stairwell and at each intersection surrounding the building. No one knows about Tracer. Don’t fuck that up.” 

Hurriedly Amelie slides her sleeve up her arm and shoves her hand into the launcher. It locks into place around her forearm and is a heavy weight she never thought she could forget.    
  
She doesn’t know what to say, and this kind of genuine appreciation isn’t something she’s felt for a long time. “Thank you,” she eventually murmurs. Reaper waves her off.    
  
“Get yourself a drink,” he jokes dryly. Amelie slings her rifle around her shoulders and silently leaves Reaper staring out the window. The last thing she sees as she slips from the room is Reaper turning his comm back on. 

Reaper was right. There are men slinking in every shadow around the building, but with her grapple Amelie evades any more unwanted meetings. She doesn’t bother to double back, knowing full well that Talon has that block in its claws now. Instead she thinks of the only place where she might blend in and quickly weaves her way through the city to the Underworld. 

*

The little doorbell of Moriarty’s Fine Books tinkles softly. The omnic looks up at her when she enters this time, and tilts its metal head. It has a triangle of blue lights above where its eyes would be, that flash as it processes its thoughts. Amelie gets the impression it’s smiling at her, so she turns and finds a little table farthest from the windows. Her rifle rests between her feet. 

Even though it’s late there are still people crowding the streets. Two humans and an omnic are sitting around the little store, and none of them seem to mind her hunkering. In these parts, Amelie supposes, people don’t mind other people's business, because noseying around probably gets them killed. 

Across the street the pub windows are all orange and warm and inviting, the people outside are loud. The air is thick with heat and hard to swallow, and people spill out into it, laughing and in each other’s arms. Amelie looks away. 

She looks away. 

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this well over a year ago, and though I've had every intention of finishing could never really bring it the ending it needed. Never the less I still wanted to share this little ficlet! Thank you for reading!


End file.
